This month I have been reading social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s new book The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. It is among other things an urgent moral argument that we desperately need to change the way that young people (and many of us in older generations) interact with social media. The book is remarkable, not least because of the vivid ways it illustrates how what we do in the world—what we spend our time doing, thinking about, desiring—deeply shapes who we are and how we see the world.
This way that we are formed becomes dangerous when we fail to pay attention to how we are shaped by what we do. If, for example, we do not notice the ways that we are shaped by the media we consume, then we might not know that watching too much MSNBC or Fox News gives us a distorted understanding of our shared social reality. Algorithms on social media apps like Instagram and Facebook show us what they think we want to see, which over time results in fewer and fewer interactions with people and sources that have a different perspective from our own. We become less capable of telling what is true from what is not. Violence in film, television, literature, and other art, when it is pervasive as it is in American culture, normalizes and minimizes violence, making us less likely to respond to an already violent culture in morally appropriate ways.
All of these are ways of being formed by what we spend our time doing. And for most of us Episcopalians, we increasingly spend most of our free time consuming the same media, in the same way that the rest of our society does. The average American spends over 2 hours every day on social media. The average adolescent and teenager spend almost 5 hours every day on social media. This does not include other screen time, including television and film, texting, video gaming, and school or work. Half of American teenagers spend over 8 hours a day on screens (not including screens at school), and the average American spends 7 hours a day on screens.
Can we imagine how deeply we are shaped by spending hours and hours a day interacting with social media and other forms of media, where we are incessantly confronted with misinformation, divisive and hateful rhetoric, body shaming, and violence? This “rewiring” of our brains and lives has significantly re-shaped the human experience for many of us, and children are most deeply impacted. We are more isolated, experience fewer meaningful social connections, have fewer opportunities for social life, and are increasingly divided in our rhetoric and desires. Rates of mental illness have skyrocketed.
Now, can we imagine what it would be like if we spent 2 hours (or 5 hours!) every day being formed by the practices of the baptismal covenant? If we read the Bible for an hour every day? If we prayed for an hour every day? If we spent hours every week serving the marginalized, the poor, the oppressed? If we spent hours every week praising God in worship? I know that some of us do! What would happen if we all committed to spending less time consuming destructive media, and spent more time, together and separate, practicing the promises of the baptismal covenant? How might we be shaped differently then? Our attention to these questions is urgently needed, and they are questions God calls us to ask.
“I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.” Romans 12:1-2
Derek Moyer, Canon for Lifelong Formation